Your Customer Welcome Mat

How many steps does it take for your customer to reach you?

Depending on how many steps, they’ll eventually land on your company “welcome mat”, eagerly knocking on the customer service door with their questions.

Think of the last time you visited a company website to submit a question. Was it a frustrating experience? Were you able to find the “Contact Us” page easily? Or perhaps, there was no page dedicated to customer service at all?

In my new role as the Visitor Support Manager for DMV.org, an internet publishing company of DMV content, I dreamed up the idea of a Visitor Support Landing Page–one that did not exist previously.

This is no easy task. It must be crafted with care and purpose. It takes a team of developers, designers and engineers to build therefore presenting the idea of this to the company was a big deal. A nail biter, I might add.

Research, Ask Lots Of Questions & Listen

Since this is new to me, I did research online by looking at the customer service pages of other companies. I talked to friends in customer service. I used my resources in the Twittersphere to gain ideas and wisdom to present the job to my absolutely best abilities. I talked with my DMV.org team and asked questions about what has and hasn’t worked in the past. After being in the trenches answering support tickets, I lassoed in the common themes of their questions in hopes to address them on the landing page.

I began brainstorming with my boss to understand what our purpose was with the landing page. Overall, the three statements below sum up the purpose of we’re trying to do:

Understand the Landing Page Purpose

• Empower the customer to save time and find answers through self service tools.
• Encourage the customer to feel welcomed, appreciated and connected to the company.
• Express what the customer service can do for the customer, including setting expectations, such as with hours of operation and how long it may take for a reply.
• Easy navigation to find and use the customer service page to avoid frustration and hassle.

Create the Blueprint 

By presenting the idea to my team, I received great feedback about what to incorporate onto the page. This gave me insight to build a wireframe and share with the design team to understand what will and won’t work. After more discussion, a page was born! Here’s what we included on our page:

• Empower: Gathered the top 5 FAQs of what visitors ask most and placed them front and center on the page to make finding information easy.
• Encourage: Smiling faces of our team to show we’re real folks behind the computer building website and answering their questions.
• Express: Explaining who we are, what we can and cannot do for the customer, including a time frame of when to expect replies from us.
• Easy: While we’re taking it one step at a time, we’ve cleaned up the footer of our website to make finding our visitor landing page easier.

Once the page was live, we knew that this page will be growing in phases along with our growing business. As time progresses and we release more self-service tools and a possible live chat support down the road,  we’ll reshape our landing page to stay relevant with what our visitors need.

Measure the Impact

In order to understand what we’re doing right and wrong with the page is to measure the impact. We’ve created daily reports to be sent to our team that give us insight into how many people are visiting our landing page, searching for support, using the FAQs, etc.

If you want to check out the landing page, you can by clicking here.

I must say it’s super exciting to learn and understand this process. Should you have any advice for my team and I, let me know!

[custom_author=jenny]